


Kiss Kill

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - The Great Gatsby Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Third Person, Revenge, Sexual Coercion, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 00:34:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2046270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He reached out, ran a single fingertip along the notches of her spine, from the base of her neck to the valley between her shoulder blades. She shivered.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“You aren’t anything like anyone,” he admitted.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss Kill

* * *

 

Tom Riddle had a reputation to build.

He kept his pistol, a sleek black Remington 51, tucked into its holster, polished leather straps buckled neatly across the center of his back, just flat enough to be concealed by the cut of his tuxedo—he watched people drown themselves in gin and whiskey and champagne, watched _hors d’oeuvres_ be passed around on shimmering silver trays amidst a cacophony of blaring trumpets and croaking saxophones; there were crisp white gloves and sticky marble floors, a garden full of fountains and fireworks, neon orange orchids and flamingo pink chrysanthemums lighting up the sky—

He preferred the shadows.

 

* * *

 

“Hermione Granger,” a girl said to him one afternoon, drawl pronounced and eyes disinterested.

She was pretty enough, he thought, her lashes thick and feathered, sooty with mascara—she’d adopted that fashionable forward slouch, posture lazy, her Grecian summer sheath slipping off her left shoulder like an expensive swath of discarded linen drapery.

“Pleasure,” he replied, taking her outstretched hand, kissing her knuckles, tasting the salt of her sweat and the chemicals of her perfume and something else, something like copper or iron or—

“I cut myself on a vase,” she explained quickly, snatching her hand back—but not before he’d seen the hastily scrubbed patch of dry, flaking blood. It wasn’t a scab. There wasn’t a cut. “The maid knocked it right over, left the pieces scattered all across my dressing table—can you even believe it? It was Ming, too, practically priceless—I had to fire her, of course.”

She held herself strangely, this girl; there was a peculiar tension in the air surrounding her, an _electricity_ , almost—it was as if there was a spark of lightning beneath her skin, dangerous and unpredictable, and it was simply waiting for the right storm to come along and let it splinter.

“Good help really is terribly hard to find,” he finally said. “If you’re smart, you’ll just steal all your staff from Gatsby.”

She sniffed, tilted her head to the side, pursed her lips and toyed with the heavy silver catch on her coin purse—chocolate brown chiffon, bittersweet notes of cocoa and coffee, miniature ivory pearls sewn along the edges like expertly diced slivers of macadamia, gleaming and subtle.

“Is that really how you do your recruiting?” she asked, sounding both amused and nervous.

He raised his eyebrows, the malaise of the scorching afternoon heat melting away like the tapered column of a candle— _drip, drip, drip_ went the wax.

“Half the reason I even come to these parties is so I can pass my card on to the chef,” he replied, and he wasn’t lying. Not really. “You haven’t had oysters until you’ve had them done by Edmond Lestrange, and that’s a fact.”

 

* * *

 

The girls at Gatsby’s parties were like saccharine statuary—ornaments, delicate and decadent, scalloped lace piped like white Royal icing along the barely decent hemlines of lemon tart yellow dresses. Their lips were the vivid, gelatinous red filling of a good cherry pie, and their skin was milky and soft, smooth as satin—a Tahitian vanilla bean _pots de crème,_ all velvet and silk with a rich, buttery finish.

Tom couldn’t tell them apart, not truly. Even with different variations of identical hairstyles—pinned-up auburn curls and cascading blonde ringlets and shimmering jet black bobs—it was difficult to distinguish between Violet and Viola and Vienna, difficult to direct any of his admittedly capricious attention to conversations that were an endless loop of the very same words— _did you hear that Gatsby played tennis at Wimbledon and did you know that Gatsby cheated at whist in the green drawing room at Versailles and Gatsby Gatsby **Gatsby** _ —

It was exhausting.

It was _infuriating._

 

* * *

 

Hermione Granger was new in town.

“Old money,” Jordan Baker told him with laughing eyes and a simpering yawn. “Her grandfather was a tenured professor at…oh, _somewhere_ —I can’t quite recall. Maybe it started with a ‘C’? Or an ‘H’? You could ask Gatsby, he knows everything, usually. He might remember.”

Tom gritted his teeth and pasted on a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he replied graciously, dragging his finger through the ice-cold condensation clustered around the base of a carafe of lemonade. “Speaking of, you don’t happen to know where he is, do you? Feels like it’s been an eternity since I last saw him around.”

She chuckled. “He’s probably with Daisy,” she said, casually twirling her cigarette holder—an elaborate confection, the colors like that of a cinnamon roll, all off-white frosted Meerschaum with a spice-warm amber mouthpiece. “They’re _inseparable_ now, haven’t you heard?”

He hadn’t, actually.

 

* * *

 

He had started calling himself Voldemort in the winter of 1920, a year before he’d gotten kicked out of Harvard—the girl from Radcliffe, Myrtle something-or-other, had been an unfortunate casualty of his experiment with French absinthe and opium powder, the first of around thirty in the greater Cambridge area; he’d had to halt production on six hundred barrels of Basilisk Venom in the aftermath, and it was only with the judicious application of Malfoy’s inheritance that they all avoided prison.

But—

 _But_ —

But Voldemort was a wholly detached identity, a concerted effort to separate himself from his father’s name and his mother’s deception; he refused to accept the life he had been given, refused to succumb to words like _abandoned_ and _forgotten_ and _unwanted_ —those words were sour on his tongue, like cheap, unfiltered vodka without the benefit of soda water, and he had no use for them.

The bullet he’d put in his father’s brain had been proof enough of that.

 

* * *

 

“How do you know Gatsby?” Hermione asked him on a sweltering evening in late July.

He studied her, puzzled by the inquiry; she was wearing a midnight blue gown with an astonishing assortment of jewelry—square emerald earrings and spangled gold bracelets and a multilayered diamond choker that reminded him of a wedding cake, each tier more dizzyingly dazzling than the last. A brooch filled with a dozen princess-cut rubies was pinned between her breasts.

“We run in similar circles,” he replied, plucking the Spanish olive out of the bottom of his martini glass; the pimento pepper packed inside was slimy against his taste buds.

This girl made him uneasy.

For all her blending in, she stood out in a way that didn’t quite match the others, not Sarah or Sasha or Selene, not their peacock loud sequins and barbed wire gossip, a politely phrased cyclone of _Gatsby Gatsby Gatsby_ —

Hermione Granger was trying, but she’d already had blood on her hands—the real sort, a fresh crimson stain like a glazed enamel lacquer over porcelain—and it was as if she didn’t know that these people liked to play with the figurative, the fake, the falsities and the flagrant but never the _honest_. Never the real.

“Oh,” she said, seemingly nonplussed. “I thought—you weren’t in the War, then? Before Harvard?”

He went still, counting down from the bridge in Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony. “Where did you hear that I went to Harvard?” he asked, placing his empty glass on a nearby window sill—intricate white plaster, meticulously molded swirls and arches, boughs and knobs, like nougat truffles and marshmallow taffy.

She met his gaze, and the slant of her mouth was a challenge. “Daisy Buchanan must have mentioned it,” she shrugged. “She’s with Gatsby almost all the time now—bit of a scandal, isn’t it?”

He barked out a laugh, incredulous; Gatsby Gatsby _Gatsby_ , always Gatsby, a threat and a constant and a reminder that even Voldemort’s secrets were not impenetrable, no matter what he liked to believe.

And this girl—this _girl_ —

Her eyes, he thought abruptly, were brighter than the diamonds around her neck.

 

* * *

 

She had a slim, granite-grey stiletto strapped to the inside of her thigh; it was immaculately forged, Italian steel rippling with swoops of chartreuse and hints of turquoise and spots of burnished orange—a heady composite of tropical beaches and rusty autumn sunsets all against the intoxicating backdrop of a black lace garter—

“Christ,” he panted, pushing her knee up, to the side, thumb slipping against the wet-hot center of her cunt. “Do you even know how to use that?”

She arched her spine, hips grinding up into the heel of his palm, strands of hazelnut-scented hair escaping her chignon and catching on the rounded burgundy edges of Gatsby’s _Encyclopedia Britannica._ “I’m trained,” she said, biting into the muscle of his shoulder. Her saliva soaked into the fabric of his shirt, turning it translucent. “I—I could kill you without it, actually—if—if I needed to.”

He had two slender fingers twisted up inside of her; she fumbled with the button on his trousers, yanked at his pockets until his cock was exposed to the stale library air, enormous in the tiny clutch of her hand—

“Who are you?” he burst out, grasping her waist and thrusting forward, _in in in_ , bracing her body against the towering mahogany bookshelf as he rolled his hips, lowered his left arm, blindly reached down, used the callused pad of his ring finger to rub her clit, hard and soft and fast and languid—

“Who are _you_?” she returned with a punched-out gasp.

The blade of her stiletto glinted sharply in the glittering electric light of the chandelier.

He realized that he couldn’t answer her question.

Because her breath was moist and sweet and cold, like peppermint schnapps, like menthol cigarettes and holiday striped candy canes that could cut through fire and fan the blistering blazing sting of a roaring inferno—and he wanted to taste and taste and _taste_.

 

* * *

 

Edmond Lestrange—a second-generation chef from a rustic farming village just outside of Rouen—was responsible for procuring the contraband for Gatsby’s parties.

There were cases of imported French champagne, unmarked crates of Canadian whiskey, homemade casks of Appalachian gin and dented copper drums full of Watney British ale; Tom knew the provenance of every last drop, could recite both the port of origin and the precise dollar amount that the quartermaster had demanded as a bribe—he knew it all, everything, the numbers and the faces and the dates, and the calculated endurance of his empire was a rather fetching point of pride.

He had enemies, of course, clever and crafty and spiteful—but Voldemort was ruthless.

He didn’t get distracted.

 

* * *

 

He spent a weekend with her in his Upper East Side apartment—he mapped the slope of her waist, the length of her legs, the divot between her collarbones and the pink-tipped curve of her breasts—he discovered that her name was from a Shakespearean tragedy, that she’d grown up in Boston and been orphaned at seventeen—she was educated, too, remarkably so, liked to recite Byron and Browning and Burns with her fingers threaded through his hair, syllables slurred while the mattress creaked and her hips rocked up and down and around—

She ate four-minute eggs and drank her tea on his terrace, stole the crusts off his toast and fed them in chunks to a pack of cooing, blue-grey pigeons; she had freckles on her abdomen, milk chocolate morsels with a hasty drizzle of caramel sauce, and he could fit the whole of his hand around the arch of her ankle—he liked that, liked the disarming disparity between her physical fragility and the ever-present sense of danger that lurked behind her smiles.

He didn’t know what she wanted with him, not yet, but he had never been so enchanted by the prospect of betrayal.

“Daisy said they were going out on Gatsby’s yacht today,” she said, lounging against a haphazard stack of pillows. Her negligee—red and gold satin, vibrant and enticing and ferocious—was bunched around her thighs. “I was invited.”

He stretched out his neck, watched her eyes linger on the string of violet-yellow bruises she’d left on his chest; he liked that, too. “He’s going to ask her to leave her husband soon,” Tom replied, moving towards the bed. He was shirtless, barefoot, a faint sheen of sweat coating his torso—she smirked as he approached.

“He shouldn’t,” she said, knees falling open.

“You don’t think she’ll say yes?”

The mattress dipped as he climbed onto it. “I think that she’s entirely invested in what _he_ can give _her_ and not the other way around,” she said, scooting backwards.

He hummed, thoughtful. “He loves her, though. Or so I’m told.”

“Gatsby is foolish,” she scoffed. “He loves her, yes, but to distraction. To _destruction_. She’s going to ruin him, and he’s going to let her.”

Tom paused. “ _In red and wreathing columns flashed, the flame as loud the ruin crashed_ ,” he said, leaning down, caging her in with his arms.

Briefly—infinitesimally—she appeared to be surprised. “ _Or into countless meteors driven, its earth-stars melted into heaven_ ,” she finished, voice quiet as she swayed towards him.

He kissed her roughly, cupped her jaw and groaned and swept his tongue along her teeth, shoved at her shoulders so that he was looming and powerful, bigger and broader and stronger—

He felt like a predator.

She nipped at his lip.

He felt like her prey.

 

* * *

 

Voldemort was a well-known entity in the criminal underworld of New York. He had learned from his mistakes in Cambridge, had subsequently arrived on Long Island with nothing more than an old-money entourage and a devious grin. He had then taken out his competitors one by one by one—throats had been slashed, bombs had been detonated, trains had been ambushed and supply ships had been sunk and there had been a swollen, tempestuous river of blood flowing through every alley and gutter and basement in Manhattan, the source of which had been obvious to anyone who knew what to search for.

Because Voldemort had a signature—a gaping, skeletal skull with a serpent protruding from its mouth, fangs retracted, black or green or silver, a design meant to instill fear and inspire trepidation—and it worked, mostly, was etched in chalk onto the metal siding of warehouses in the meatpacking district, was carved into the bellies of his victims using broken glass and shoddy surgical tools; it had been stamped onto barrels of Basilisk Venom, too, before the accident.

It was a message.

It was a warning.

It was a promise, and it was _haunting_.

 

* * *

 

“You don’t trust me,” she mused in early August, perched on the end of the East Egg boat dock; she was swinging her feet, toes skimming the dimpled blue surface of the water. A paisley yellow scarf was covering her hair, knotted silk corners frayed and messy.

“Not a bit,” he agreed, leaning back on his elbows, white lawn shirtsleeves folded over his forearms.

A large wicker picnic basket sat behind them, two half-empty bottles of Chateau Yquem nestled in its depths—there was a platter of oysters, a jar of horseradish and several wilting lemon rinds, a bakery box of floral-themed petit-fours and pastel-dyed macaroons, crab and cucumber sandwiches on sweet white bread, a crumbling block of Stilton bleu with fig preserves and Irish soda crackers—there had been strawberries, too, but they had been left on Malfoy’s sailboat.

“Why?” she asked, tone cautious.

He stared at her bare legs, the gauzy chenille pleats of her skirt fluttering in the wind. “You and I,” he began, mouth dry. He stopped. He tried again. “You and I—we’re…nearly the same.”

She squinted into the sun, nodding slowly. “You aren’t anything like I thought you would be,” she murmured, low enough that the words felt ethereal, powdered sugar sprinkled along the frothing crest of the waves, finely milled fairy dust evaporating into a soaring blanket of clouds—

He reached out, ran a single fingertip along the notches of her spine, from the base of her neck to the valley between her shoulder blades. She shivered.

“You aren’t anything like anyone,” he admitted.

 

* * *

 

Thirty people had died after consuming a test batch of Basilisk Venom.

The proportions had been wrong—the opium had ultimately acted as a fatal dose of paralytic poison rather than a relaxant, and the absinthe had remained a simple, overpriced flavoring agent. It had been an unmitigated disaster.

Tom had combed through the obituaries in the weeks that followed; he had recorded the names of the deceased in a blank canvas journal—for either posterity or penitence, he had chosen not to dwell—and he had stashed the journal in a triple-combination locked safe under his desk.

He’d never thought to open it again.

 

* * *

 

“I told you Daisy wouldn’t leave her husband,” Hermione sighed, puckered crystal tumbler hanging loosely from the canopy of her hand. Her nails were painted a dull, muted shade of lavender. Tom hated it. “Jordan Baker said that the _confrontation_ , as it were, was all very dramatic—goose feathers flying everywhere amidst the shouting, apparently.”

Tom snorted. “Gatsby— _Gatsby_ —was found murdered in his own swimming pool, and _this_ is what you want to discuss?”

Hermione shifted on the rose-patterned Aubusson rug in front of his fireplace, unlit and eerily dark behind its cast-iron grate. “People die,” she retorted coolly. “Sometimes it’s on purpose, and sometimes it’s for no reason at all. Why talk about it?”

He clenched his jaw so hard that the tendons in his neck were ropes and cords and cables—liable to shred, split, _snap_ under the weight of his confusion. “At least you’re _consistently_ detached from fucking reality,” he snarled, tossing back a gratuitous gulp of eighteen-month aged Scottish whiskey. It sloshed against his tonsils like acid, burning and corrosive. “Never talked about your parents, then? The dead ones? Not to anyone?”

Her face was flushed a striking, torrid pink, the color spreading high across her cheekbones—he could not decide if it was from anger or alcohol, and he could not quit vacillating between regret and remorse and _rage_ —because Gatsby was gone, because Gatsby had not been invincible, because Gatsby had been taken down, toppled over, trampled under the satin-soled kitten heels of a _girl_ , a girl who wasn’t nearly as interesting or as gorgeous or as _brilliant_ as Hermione—Hermione, _Hermione_ —

“No,” she stated flatly, without inflection. “I’ve done enough talking, I think.”

 

* * *

 

He woke up to a small silver ladies’ revolver pointed directly at his forehead.

“You killed my father,” Hermione said, oddly gentle.

Tom's lips parted, parched and parchment-thin as they tightened with the sudden movement. “Not personally,” he replied, swallowing.

The heavy damask curtains rustled.

“That first night,” she started. “When I was wearing the stiletto—I had meant to slide it right between your ribs once we got to the library. I wanted to puncture your lungs, wanted to watch you suffocate and choke and really—really _feel_ you die. I wanted that. The _satisfaction_ of it.”

“Hermione—”

“I still want that. I do. But I also—” She broke off and forced out a laugh, a harsh, desperate sort of sound that pierced through his eardrums like a white-hot lance. “I also want _you_.”

She clicked back the hammer of the gun.

“Those two things are mutually exclusive,” he said, voice cracking.

She flinched.

Outside, the sky was thickening with pre-dawn light—expansive chasms of fog and mist and roving, restless, whispering ghosts.

The kiss of the revolver was cold and steady against his skin.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> the poem quoted is from “the siege of corinth” by lord byron. 
> 
> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
